Member Avatar for hollystyles

I installed Ubuntu Efty Edge this weekend on an older box I had lying around. It has a nic based on the National Semiconductor Corporation (McPhyter II) chipset. But the network card is not working.

dmesg | grep eth

Reveals nothing ??

lsmod

Shows that module natsemi is loaded as a kernal module, but not driving anything.

lspci

Identifies the nic correctly

But there's no sign of the device in the Network gui.

I added a modprobe.conf file in /etc becuase I didn't have one, and the Ubuntu forums were down for maintenance and I couldn't find out where I was supposed to put:

alias eth0 natsemi

but still no joy. I've read thousands of linux forum posts but none of them seem to quite match my issue. I did look in /var/system.log and there's something there regarding the nic I'll post the message when I get home tonight.

Anyway please Linux Gurus bring me into the fold.

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Dani AI

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Brief expert note for (and follow-up for ): the symptoms reported — the NIC being seen on the PCI bus while the natsemi driver is present but the kernel fails to initialize the device with an error code — point to the driver being unable to bind because the device appears "busy" to the kernel. Common, non-destructive causes are a conflicting driver already attached, BIOS/resource reservation on older hardware, or the module probing at the wrong time during boot. This is not proof the card is dead; it narrows the problem to driver/resource binding.

Practical diagnostic steps to produce the clearest clues (run as root or with sudo). Replace <pci-id> with the bus ID from lspci if needed:

sudo lspci -k
sudo lshw -C network
ip link show
cat /proc/interrupts | grep -i eth
ls -l /sys/bus/pci/devices/<pci-id>/driver
sudo modprobe -r natsemi
sudo modprobe natsemi
dmesg | tail -n 50

What to look for: whether lspci -k shows a kernel driver in use, whether the device appears in /sys/bus/pci/devices and which driver (if any) owns it, whether interrupts or I/O ports are assigned, and any fresh probe messages immediately after reloading the module. If another driver is bound, unbinding that driver (via the sysfs driver/unbind interface) or blacklisting it via a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ is the usual fix; on older Ubuntu releases the exact config location and initramfs rebuild steps differ, so be cautious and back up files before editing.

If probe still fails, try the NIC in a different machine or boot a recent LiveCD/USB to test against a newer kernel — many old NIC quirks were fixed in later kernels. Supplying the outputs of the above commands and the most recent kernel log lines will let responders narrow whether this is a bind conflict, a BIOS/resource issue, or a driver/kernel bug.

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Member Avatar for DimaYasny

what does lspci show?

Member Avatar for hollystyles

/var/log/messages says:
natsemi: probe of 0000:00:0c.0 failed with error -16

lspci says:
00:0c.0 Ethernet Controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (McPhyter) Ethernet Controller

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